DOSBox

So for a new blog post, Gordon suggested that I "try and get a really old game like Realms of the Haunting working". This is a game I had played a few years ago and never finished, but I am very familiar with the practice of getting old PC games from the 80's and 90's running on new computers.

There is an open-source and free program called DOSBox available for many different OSes. What it is is just an MS-DOS emulator that works through a command line interface. It turns troubleshooting for old DOS games on modern machines into child's play, just running the game's executable file through DOSBox is enough most of the time.

You can check the very large list of compatible games with the program on the website which are colour-coded as either Broken, Runnable, Playable or Not Supported. Fortunately by this point in time, years since DOSBox had started development, most of the games in the list are able to be run through DOSBox with great results.

A few of the games that I have used the program for in recent memory are Blood (a 1997 computer first-person shooter in the style of Doom and Duke Nukem 3D), The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (which an interesting project involving reverse-engineering the Daggerfall engine to make a "source port" style platform is being made for, since the source code for the engine doesn't seem to exist anymore) and Crusader: No Remorse (a top-down isometric sci-fi action game with a catchy soundtrack).